Photo by Steve Sharp on Unsplash

Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
But rescue us from the evil one.

(From the “the Lord’s Prayer” in the Gospel of Matthew 6:9-13)

Your kingdom come.

“We don’t need to pray this anymore because…the kingdom has come!”

So said some teachers in the Christian circles in which I grew up. They meant that the kingdom of God came with the church in Acts 2:37-47.

I’m not here to argue with them if that it what they still believe.

I do believe the kingdom of God gently gestates in the church of Christ, yet I keep praying–with Jesus–for the kingdom to come “as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west” (Gospel of Matthew...

Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

[The devil] is always sending errors into the world in pairs – pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse…he relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I’m thinking of two Christians who are older than me and who once taught me about Christianity when I was young.

Back in those days they impressed me with their devotion to Jesus Christ. You could say that Jesus was always “in their hands” (the way they served people) and “on their lips” (the way they talked about Jesus).

Imagine my confusion and dismay, all these years later, when I find that these two Christians rarely, if ever, demonstrate or speak of Jesus anymore.

Both of them, at one time some of the mildest and tenderest Christians I knew, now use some...

Photo by Monika Simeonova on Unsplash

I think I was in early high school when my dad gave me Rush Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be.

I read the entire book in a weekend. Soon, I was a dittohead.

I embraced the kind of political and social conservatism that I learned from Limbaugh. I embraced the identity of “conservative” to the point that even the Rush Limbaugh neckties I wore announced my conservatism to everyone.

Not only my clothes, but my entertainment, friends and language came from, and fed back into, my identity as a conservative.

Thirty years later, as I look back on that time, I can see that I did and said things because those were the things conservatives were supposed to do and say. In other words, I filtered each choice and each word through the metric of “whether a good conservative would do or say it.”

This made things easy for me for a while. My...

Photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash

People who run for office, whether they run for President of the United States or president of student council, make big promises.

When I ran for second grade class president, I think I promised all-day recess.

I won.

Do you think I kept that promise?

Did it matter? Enough second graders believed me to put me in office.

To be clear, I think I thought I could pull it off. I wasn’t trying to fool my fellow second-graders. I just didn’t know that the second grade president had less power than the cartons of milk in the cafeteria!

I’m a fan of U.S. presidential history, so I looked up some of the biggest promises that presidential candidates made (and broke):

In 1928, Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” A year after he won the White House, the U.S. plunged into the worst economic depression in...

Photo by David Monje on Unsplash

Have you ever felt out of place?

Like really out of place?

A few years ago, we went to what we thought would be a classy New Year’s Eve party for middle-aged parents.

We put on our dresses, jackets and ties for a mild night out.

What we walked in on, however, was a wild night out!

When our well-dressed clique entered the venue (looking like we arrived from our suburban subdivisions in minivans and station wagons), we found ourselves in a punk rock rager.

Everyone but us had on black leather, chains, and dark lipstick. Some of the men were shirtless. So were some of the women. Every smokey eye pierced us like the studs through many of the ears, lips and noses in the place.

And while they were wearing less clothes than our group, who do you think felt more exposed?

The Gospel of Matthew 2:1-12 tells a similar story:

In the time of King Herod,...

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

A reading from the Gospel of Luke 2:8 - 20:

Now in that same region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to...

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

A few days ago, I said something no American man ever wants to say: “I’m washed up.”

But it’s true. I am washed up.

I’ve lost my edge, my mojo, my swagger.

I don’t mean that I’ve lost my love for life; I mean that the work I once did so well is not working anymore. I used to have seemingly bottomless creativity, energy, grit, and run-through-walls determination.

Not anymore.

I’m burned out. Spent. Toast.

Even if it doesn’t feel good to be washed up, it feels good–freeing–to say it out loud.

Like letting my freak flag fly on LinkedIn.

There is a belief common in American enterprise that a man or woman must be always on the upswing, always positive, always winning.

For example, when you flame out at your job, you can’t admit to the marketplace that you just can’t do it anymore. You have to “spin” it into something like: “I decided to focus...

Photo by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash

These days, it seems that some politicians can build a “base” by promising to just get rid of anyone their fans fear, despise, or oppose.

It’s not the politicians that bother me as much as those who believe them.

Do they think that by putting Democrats in office, all Republicans will either be forced, or just retreat, back into their “basket”?

Or do they think that by putting Republicans in office, all Democrats will be forced, or just retreat, to the coasts, college campuses, and inner cities?

A lot of people these days seem to think that the solution to every problem is to just make people they don’t like…disappear.

Does anyone else see the problem with this?

For one, it is impractical and…impossible. Anyone who has ever been part of a family ought to know this. I’m not even talking about extended family. Three people and one dog live in our...

Photo by Ali Inay on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my doctor diagnosing me with mild anxiety and depression…and being 30 pounds overweight.

That didn’t take me by surprise. None of my pants fit and my shirts strain to cover my, ahem, dad bod. I know myself well enough to know that I haven’t been…myself. For a while now, the light in my world has gone sad, like the last sunsets of summer.

For the people I love, I don’t want to stay in this place, but…it’s not a bad place. I’ve read the Bible too many times to miss that people who pursue God must wander in a wilderness. There is no other way.

And where I am now is nothing if not the loneliest wilderness of my life.

In terms that American men are likely to understand: I’m having a mid-life crisis. It’s that time in an American man’s life when he knows his plans are not going to work out. He sees the time growing...